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FREDRICK B. PIKE, FDR's Good Neighbor Policy: Sixty Years of Generally Gentle Chaos (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1995), 416 pp. $34.95 cloth (ISBN 0-292-76557-6).
While the inauguration of a Good Neighbor policy toward Central and South America seems always to be credited to FDR, the fact is that it really had its genesis during the very much maligned Hoover administration in the late 1920s.
Notwithstanding, Franklin Delano Roosevelt dominates Fredrick B. Pike's excellent volume on the history of this seeming benevolence on the part of the United States. True, more effort was expended during his years in office in effecting good relations with the Southern hemisphere. However, the reasons for the hail-neighbor-well-met stance changed as the exigencies of the times changed.
The period following the Mexican War when we forcibly annexed from our nearest neighbor what are now the states of California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming certainly did not engender good feelings south of the border. This animosity on the...